Online search engines such as Google®, Yahoo! Alta Vista, and the like are used by many Internet users to search for a variety of items. The searched items may include books, media content (e.g., audio and video content), documents, and other products or services such as accounting, tourism, car rental, air travel, hotels, restaurants, and the like. Some of the items are available online from various e-commerce web sites. For example, a large number of items are offered for sale at web sites such as Amazon.com, eBay.com, Travelzoo.com, Dell.com, and so forth.
Users may search for items of interest directly from these web sites. For instance, a user interested in purchasing or obtaining information related to a particular laptop computer can navigate to the Amazon.com or Dell.com web site and search for the laptop using whatever search tools are provided by the respective site. One drawback of this approach is that users will need to adapt to the possibly limited capabilities of an on-site search engine to find the desired item(s).
Also, many users may not know exactly what model or brand they want to purchase, or even the URL of a web site from which to make their purchase. Such users might first perform one or more informational searches where they enter various laptop models or manufacturer names into a general-purpose search engine (such as the Google® search engine) to see what particular choices are available. They then might perform a navigational search by entering in their chosen search engine the name of a shopping site (such as “Amazon” or “Dell”), hoping that one of the top results will provide a link to the corresponding site (such as “http://www.amazon.com” or “http://www.dell.com”). After selecting a link from the navigation search results and landing on the desired web-site, these users would then need to enter the product names of interest from the first set of search results into the on-site search engine to continue with their shopping. In addition to requiring users to employ multiple search engines, possibly with different interfaces and capabilities, this is an inefficient process as it requires users to perform multiple, possibly redundant, searches from the different search engines. Also, it might be the case that products identified in the first information searches are not available on the shopping site selected from the navigational search results. Therefore, it would be desirable to provide users who might have limited information about web site URLs and particular products available on those sites with a more efficient and consistent searching and shopping experience.
Like reference numerals refer to corresponding parts throughout the drawings.